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As it often does, Falcon Northwest has provided with an ultra-high-end PC as a showcase for Intel’s latest high-end desktop CPU. This $8,028 Mach V comes with the latest and greatest of everything and provides a useful benchmark of the performance we can expect to see from boutique gaming PCs for the next few months. At press time, neither Falcon Northwest nor its competition is taking orders for Core i7-based PCs, so you’ll have to wait a few weeks to make a purchase. Were you to invest in a PC such as this one when it does go on sale, you can expect it to provide a near limitless PC gaming experience.

Typically we review Falcon Northwest’s Mach V desktops unpainted, but this system showed up in our lab with a glimmering red automotive paint job. That’s typically a $500 option, so if your PC budget just has to stay under that $8,000 mark, losing the paint is a good way to shave costs. Otherwise, this system bears Falcon Northwest’s typically immaculate interior.

The only criticisms we have are the inward-facing hard-drive bays (which make it harder to swap drives) and the machined door on the lower half of the front panel. Because it has a little play to it, shutting it can inadvertently hit the PC’s reset button. The only thing behind the door is a fan, however, so we’ll concede that fan maintenance is the most common reason to open it, a task typically conducted with the system shut off.

The hardware configuration inside this system reads like a PC gaming wishlist. The highlight is Intel’s new Core i7-965 Extreme Edition quad-core CPU, which Falcon Northwest has liquid-cooled and overclocked, from 3.2GHz to 3.79GHz. To accommodate that chip, Falcon has opted for an Asus P6T motherboard featuring Intel’s new X58 chipset. Alongside the CPU this system came with 12GB of 1,066MHz DDR3 SDRAM, the largest RAM allotment we’ve ever seen in a consumer desktop. The 12GB might feel like an odd amount, but keep in mind that the Core i7/X58 platform has a triple-channel memory interface. We expect RAM in multiples of three will be the new standard in Intel-based PCs over the next two years.

You’ll also find Intel’s solid-state, 80GB X-25M hard drive inside this PC, combined with a standard 1TB, 7,200rpm Hitachi hard drive. The presence of the X-25M drive means a few different things for the Mach V. First, one of the key benefits of solid-state hard drives, Intel’s in particular, is that they’re faster than traditional hard drives. They also have smaller capacities for the dollar, as it typical with any breakthrough new technology

We didn’t find that the Mach V booted any faster than a PC with a standard hard drive, but you can expect the solid-state Intel drive will hasten large data transfers, including load times between game levels. With the operating system already taking up about 6GB of precious solid-state capacity, that leaves you with only 68GB or so to play with. For that reason, you’ll want to store your media library on the Hitachi drive, and you might find yourself having to relocate games and other applications as the solid-state drive fills up. The other solid-state drive bonus is that they’re cooler and quieter than a standard drive. Given that the 3D cards in this PC are hot to the touch, we appreciate any component that will help minimize internal heat.Click Here!

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